Electronic-business (e-business) is the process of using Internet-related and computer technologies to improve business operations. An important e-business function is the secure and efficient transfer of documents between entities in electronic form. In this regard, an established component of e-business operations is the computer-implemented translation of electronic documents being sent and received.
The computer applications that undergird e-business operations are capable of producing and accepting electronic documents in accordance with agreed upon standards, conventions, and protocols. However, in most business environments there are no universal formats to which all such documents may adhere. Consequently, before electronic documents may be transferred from one application to another, the documents are translated from a form acceptable to the first application to another form acceptable to the second application.
For a practical example, in the health-care industry, care providers (e.g., physicians, medical clinics, hospitals, etc,) are required to send certain information to insurance companies about the health-care services provided to insured patients. However, in order to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in health insurance and health care delivery, the Federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 sets forth the U.S. Government's guidelines for the administration of health insurance and health-care services. In particular, HIPAA specifies how medical documents including patient information are to be handled. Basically, HIPAA specifies that all patient information must not be made public. Consequently, in providing health insurance and health-care services, the privacy of patient information included in documents has to be maintained.
If, for example, patient information is to be conveyed from a care provider to an insurer in electronic form, the care provider typically has to translate the data format of the electronic document to be conveyed to the data format used by the insurer. The translation process changes the data format and/or syntax of the first application's document to that of the second application's (resulting) document. Since HIPAA specifies that the privacy of the conveyed information is to be maintained, it is important to track how the document was handled during the translation process. In other words, an audit trail including the translation process should be maintained. For audit purposes (e.g., if a question arises about the validity of the health-care information in the translated document), the original document and the map (set of instructions used by translator program) for translating the original document to the resulting document may be maintained. Nevertheless, a significant problem with previous electronic document translation techniques is that they do not assure a recipient of a translated document that it can be non-repudiably tied to the original document and/or to the map used for the original document's translation (i.e., “non-repudiable” in the sense that the recipient may not deny ownership of the resulting document). Consequently, there is no way for a recipient (e.g., e-business partner, auditor, etc.) to explicitly or legally tie the original and resulting documents together, or otherwise demonstrate the validity of the translation process.